The Lee Family. Once upon a time Noel and Rena got married and had 2 kids - Doris and Donald. Then one day, Doris got married to Jeremy and had her own 2 kids - Vince and Edda. We all live far apart, and keep moving around. It's hard to keep tabs on each other. Welcome to our blog.

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Becoming a nurse.

My cousin-in-law, Christine, just started nursing school this fall. Every week, in addition to classes, she has a full day rotation through a hospital where she shadows a nurse and provides basic patient care to one patient throughout the day - stuff like changing sheets, helping folks to the bathroom, performing vital checks, etc. It's all very exciting to me because 3 years ago - right before I reentered the work force, I was seriously considering going to nursing school myself. I wanted a job where the pay was pretty good and the hours and location needed to be extremely flexible and the potential upswing was high. Nursing sounded like a really good option! I applied, but (obviously) didn't end up going.

Last week, at Sunday night dinner, Christine taught me how to set up a sterile field to do wound care, mainly bedsores, which need to have their dressings changed every 8 hours (I think). Everything comes in a compact sterile box - gauze, gloves, tape?, scissors?:

1 comment:

Christine
said...

Thanks for the props, Doris! As I look at these pictures, I see there is a key ingredient missing form the sterile field: it's supposed to be at waist level. That helps you keep your hands up and germ free and also keeps the field away from your body below the waist. We all know what nasties live down there (E. coli for example). BTW I passed my skills exam on this so I'm legal to set up an actual one. Yikes!